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Say it ain’t so, Tuukka — or something like that. A reporter asked Tuukka Rask to offer Boston sports fans some reassurance that their NHL team’s current predicament isn’t a living facsimile of one of the most famous collapses in playoff history.

The current Bruins, of course, have lost two straight games to squander a 3-1 series lead and set up Monday night’s Game 7 against the reborn Maple Leafs.

It was only three springs ago that a Boston roster not dissimilar to this one grabbed a 3-0 series advantage in a second-round tilt with the Philadelphia Flyers, only to become the third team in league history to cough up the next four games. Rask, who was in goal for the duration of that epic fold, didn’t want any part in reliving that nightmare, even for the purposes of assuaging a rabid sports city’s urge to pound the panic button.

“You know what, I don’t even want to talk about that,” Rask said after Sunday’s 2-1 Toronto win. “This is the playoffs and we haven’t played good enough.”

Perhaps there are other factors at work. As former Leafs executive Bill Watters helpfully reminded the hockey world on Twitter on Monday, two members of Boston’s highest-scoring regular-season forward line, Brad Marchand and Patrice Bergeron, were diagnosed with concussions in early April.

Since returning, Marchand has just two goals and three assists in a combined 13 regular-season and post-season games. Bergeron, in the same 13-game span that includes six playoff games with the Leafs, has one goal and one assist. That’s a dramatic drop-off from their pre-concussion production, when both players were averaging a little less than a point a game. Marchand had 33 points in 38 games until his head injury. Bergeron, who has suffered four publicly diagnosed concussions during his career, had 31 points in 35 games.

Boston coach Claude Julien wasn’t much in the mood for analyzing the underperformance of his top players on Sunday.

“I have no comment on my lines,” he said.

Julien clearly attempted to motivate members of his first line by reducing their ice time in Game 6’s early going. He went so far as to use Marchand, the team’s leading regular-season scorer, about as sparingly as a typical fourth liner.

No matter the prodding, the trio of Marchand, Bergeron and winger Tyler Seguin went scoreless on Sunday night; they have combined for a single goal and three points all series. Seguin, forever linked to Leafland as key piece of the trade the brought Phil Kessel to Toronto, has not registered a point in the entire series, which led the Air Canada Centre crowd to serenade him on Sunday with chants of, “Thank you, Seg-uin!”

“I think we’ve had plenty of opportunities throughout the series to score goals, especially early on the first few games we felt good and we were creating a lot, but they weren’t going in,” Marchand told reporters before Sunday’s game. “You just have to dig down, especially against their goalie — he’s very good and very good in close. He’s a big guy and closes off the net very well, so we have to make sure to sometimes hold it for an extra second, make him move, make him get down and open something up, so maybe something like that. We’ll take whatever we can get.”

Said Seguin on Sunday: “We obviously know how we’re playing and how much more we want to bring to the table. It’s about being accountable right now.”

Rask has been Boston’s best player. And even if he isn’t in the mood to talk about the failures of the past certainly he, above all Bruins, seems acutely attuned to the challenge of the near present.

“It’s one game decides the season,” Rask said Sunday. “We just have to try and play our best game of the year. We really have played some great games this year, and we’ve played some awful games. The last two games have not been in that top category. So (Monday) is our chance to continue the season with a good game or finish it off with a bad one.”

From Star Dispatches: Reporters Joseph Hall and Paul Hunter check in with the winning 1967 Leafs to listen to the advice they have for this year’s team. Maple Leafs: Catching Up with the Past is available at Stardispatches.com. To get your copy, subscribe for only $1/week at Stardispatches.com or purchase for $2.99 at starstore.ca

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